I was tasked with dealing with a bug, this week. Sometimes, people would look into registering a domain, and our site would tell them it was available. This was pretty bogglesome, and it was especially annoying because dealing with it meant dealing with OpenSRS. OpenSRS’s API is all kinds of goofy, but I had not noticed how goofy it can be until today.

Every day, I see another stupid, broken email generated by crappy software used by a company that I’d think would know better. Today, the perpetrator was Nintendo. They wanted me to take a survey. I took it, because they promised me some sort of Zelda-themed stylus. I almost didn’t know that, though, because when I opened the message, it was empty. Huh?

I’ve written too much already about Addex so I will only review for just a few paragraphs. Addex uses your address book to produce configuration for your various mailtools.

Rep. Samuelson:

The latest release of CPAN::Mini needs to be replaced, because it contains stupid OS X 10.5 resource fork crap. That’s not why I’m going to replace it, though.

A while ago, I wrote about smarkdown, my little program that “upgrades” email from plaintext to multipart alternative mail with plaintext and HTML alternatives.

The first thing I really had to do in order to start giving Hiveminder a try was to load in all my tasks from OmniFocus. This was a little tedious. Unluckily for me, I missed my bus home on Friday and had to kill four hours at the office, waiting for the next one. I used some of this time getting things loaded into Hiveminder and then cleaning up the data I’d loaded.

A lot of Addex features rely on your ability to put extra information onto address book entries. A really simple example is its generation of procmail rules. If it’s going to filter mail from Mom into the “family/mom” folder, I need to be able to tell it that I want that kind of filtering. Address book programs, though, are not usually designed to store all the information Addex wants.

I’ve complained before about how stifling I find GUI mail apps. I can’t commit a few twitches to muscle memory that allow me to perform useful and complex operations the way I can with mutt. There are some things that GUI apps get right, like high-level folder browsing, but mostly I just despise them. Mail.app’s integration with Address Book always tempted me, because I am pretty careful about putting everyone into it. It was irritating to get nothing out of it. Ages ago, I wrote a little program with Mac::Glue that would generate a mutt aliases file from my address book. Later it grew to produce some other configuration, and finally it became addex.

In the index for “Catalyst” book, you’ll find no entry for model, controller, action, dispatch, or ActionClass. These are some of the most fundamental concepts in Catalyst.